When did it get discovered and when did people start using it widely?

early 1995

I think it was early 1995, iirc...

It was an idea from one of the early QW beta testers (a guy named ag|sane IIRC) that John Carmack put on his to-do list right after the release of qtest & netquake.

A lot of other ideas from QW's beta period also made it into the game such as:

- dm2 buttons (an important feature of QW, suggested by someone named foogs or fogs or something)
- red armor (it was originally a bottle of painkillers until someone changed it)
- lightning gun (originally called the "Link Gun" - the patent was bought by Epic and implemented in Unreal instead)
- removed the portal gun
- QW used to play random clips of Nine Inch Nails songs when you bunnyhopped, but it was removed
- bunny "floating" was added and then removed; you used to be able to float really high, it was fun
- removed Herobrine
- etc

idk but cu
cream

Anyone care to give a serious answer?

QW Wiki has an article about bunnyhopping. I first saw people using it on TF servers during summer of 2000.

gotta mention this guy
http://wiki.quakeworld.nu/Sectopod

I would say it was tried as early as '96 as first Quake Done Quick demos featured some attempts on it (some tricks aren't possible w/o).
In QW it was actually quite difficult technically prior to QW 2.30/2.33 as sometimes your hops would just get stopped sometimes in the landing process. In '99 bunnyhopping was widely spread as far as I remember.

IIRC 2.3x still had the issue. Kteams had a server side fix that made it work but caused prediction error until ZQuake fixed it in the engine, making it work in other mods

Mid-Late 99 had the first signs of bunnyhopping in competitive QW. I remember especially Akke from SK in Heroes and Villains Season 1 was particularly good at this. But as mentioned, you couldn't bunnyhop for very long until it "stopped". Villains Season 2 in early 2000(?) was the first time I saw bunnyhopping like it is done today. I think Akke (again) and Pietro in particular had mastered this back then.

rj+bunnyhop out from dm4-mega was atleast shown april 99 @ TGI, Maybe not true bunnyhopping by todays standards.

I used it in one of my old qw-movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAPwcGKhSGg @ around 20 mark. think sectopod or nikodemus, game was vs sujoy.

http://wiki.quakeworld.nu/TGI

I remember that name coming back a few time when I talked about bunny hopping discovery with people.

When a few guys started using bunny on our lans back in 98-99 it felt like they cheated or smth.
But the others soon got the hang of it

I watched a demo from the Rapture 99 event with DOOMer, Kane etc and that showed really no traces of bunnyhopping whatsoever. Fast forward a couple of years to a demo with Flaming Fist and Dag, then it resembled modern QW a bit more with bunnyhopping (and the infamous kfjump), proper starts on DM3 etc so I'd agree with what you're saying.

Here's the June 3rd, 1999 .plan entry from John Carmack himself (the relevant part of the entry, anyway):

Whee! Lots of hate mail from strafe-jupers!

Some reasonable messages have convinced me that a single immediate jump after landing may be important to gameplay. I'll experiment with it.

Strafe jumping is an exploitable bug. Just because people have practiced hard to allow themselves to take advantage of it does not justify it's existance. When I tried fixing the code so that it just didn't work, I thought it changed the normal running movement in an unfortunate way.

In the absense of powerups or level features (wind tunnels, jump pads, etc), the game characters are supposed to be badasses with big guns. Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sigourney Weaver don't get down a hallway by hopping like a bunny rabbit.

This is personal preference, but when I play online, I enjoy it more when people are running around dodging, rather than hopping.

My personal preference just counts a lot. :-)

He never did take it out.

I think that was about the early stages of Q3A, not QW, or am I wrong here?

Here's some interesting links:

[1] http://www.esreality.com/post/350252/n-a/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20001201184800fw_/http://www.planetquake.com/qdq/ZigZag/article.htm
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKdwcLytloU

#1 has some interesting posts by a guy named lodis that explain a lot.
#2 is an archive.org copy of the planetquake.com page he refers to.
#3 is a video I discovered about one of the first bunny hop training sessions

I can attest hearing about "bunny hopping" back when I played NQ, which was around the 1996-1997 period. I quit some time around QW's release since I wasn't very interested in FPS games at the time, so bunny hopping had to have been discovered during the early, early days of QW, or just prior to QW's release IMO.

i was there. somewhere in 98 people started realizing that you could jump and build it.

96 to ~98 some people knew that:

- you ran faster if you did strafe strafe strafe strafe
- you ran faster if you strafed along a wall. which i still do quite often
- in TF you could keep an OK speed with the heavier classes if you kept jumping

after a while people started to figure out you could build it by jumping. Sectopod was the first guy who "mastered it".

THE training ground was jumping around on e4m3. the jump wanted to really learn was dm3 bridge -> RL so that was when you passed the test i guess.

good times. flying around the map at blazing speeds built up from the beginning of 99 until.. well still going. got crazy around 00-01 i would say?

(Edited 2014-05-28, 00:30)

definetly. way before Q3. That was one of the disappointing things with Q3 when it came out that you couldnt do it as well as in QW.

I meant the above quote from Carmacks plan:
"Here's the June 3rd, 1999 .plan entry from John Carmack himself (the relevant part of the entry, anyway):"

Note the date.

I think I started bunnyjumping around 1998-1999.

I think around fall '98 or early '99. When Sectopod did the famous RL-boosted bunnyjump on DM4 vs Sujoy during TGI (april 99), we had been bunnyjumping for a few months, iirc.

As far as I remember, it was introduced in QW version 2.1 which was released in October 1997.

EDIT: It doesn't mention bunnyhopping explicitly but here's the release notes from QW 1.64 to 2.30:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990202074551/http://www.quakeworld.net/misc/qwrlnote.txt

Lots of good old stuff here as well:
http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/

Cool replies guys, thanks.

First I really remember in QW was Sectopod at TGI (about 15 years ago), as it was something you didn't see from the other top players. But maybe I had seen it before and it was just that specific scenario (mega escape) that made it stick in the memory.

In the UK later that year there was this modem player called Jimbob who was famous for being one of the first here to master it, you'd get people asking him to teach them how to hop LOL To be fair I think part of the reason was as mentioned in an earlier post the bug in QWSV made it really hard to bunnyhop with 72fps, but most modem players typically capped at a lower number like 50fps (since networking wasn't decoupled from framerate back then and high framerates could flood a modem). So it was much easier to hop with lower framerate, although if you had high ping it wasn't great due to the prediction errors.

Looking further afield to the European clan scene in late '99 / early 2000 the main evolution of good hopping players I 'discovered' was something like this:
-Rock (ZR)
-Trinidy (E)
-aKKe (SK/FF), Pietro (FF)

Some of these players had a really 'expansive' mousing style, you know, big sweeps etc. I suspect this may have been influenced by cl_sidespeed/forward speed ratios. Also there was an uptime bug in QW2.30 which I'm sure some players exploited (meaning you could get like 107% speed or whatever if you left your PC on for over 24hrs).

The thing you have to understand which will sound crazy now was that bunnyhopping was at one time not a standard skill so you'd have a situation people would ask if you could do it or not, or you'd have matches where one team could hop and the other couldn't! Also until the bug where sometimes you would just slide to the side without jumping got patched in kteams it maybe wasn't as effective.

edit: what made it really exciting wasn't so much the fact that players were zooming round really fast, but more the actual impact that had on the way 4on4 was played. Zetor were the first clan I saw playing dm3 in a 'loose' style (i.e. players moving round quickly between positions to cover other areas of the map) rather than the typical static positions you used to see from most teams in the 90s. This was then extended by Euthanasia and of course Flaming Fist to create the blueprint for modern QW (although of course further innovations have been made).

I was a fan of those guys/clans... used to spend hours watching demos! good times!!!

loved aKKe style!

In his .plan entry, Carmack was talking about bunnyhopping in general (Q2 had already been out for a year and a half by this point) in a discussion about his work on Quake III. So he had QuakeWorld and Quake II in mind.

I'm pretty sure its earlier than you all think. Most likely somebody in qdq, combining zigzagging and jumping, and it was most likely discovered in netquake and then continued in quakeworld

Of course sectopod showing sujoy what's up on DM4 was one early moment but for sure it wasn't the start since already its a combiantion RJ+bunny

For me personally, the first time I saw bunny hopping, it was introduced to me as an already existing skill, and I believe it was in the first weeks/month of me playing in 1999 with 300 ping on who knows what servers.

The nick that I remember now was a russian player by the name of redwhite, I don't think I ever played with him or even saw him on a server, but he was talked about and being known for smoothly jumping between quad and ring on DM3! And at the same time, somebody I was playing with (nick deathknight) was showing off that he was able to jump on DM3 across the RA room.

Of course now both of these jumps we can all do blindfolded and backwards (and that's not even an exaggeration...) which shows how far we've come, but that's where it started for me...

And then the arcade flavors of quakeworld jumping/rocketjumping came out, as I'd just be chilling on a ffa/rune map or something, some EXMY map, and someone like paradoks (yes ParadokS) would show up out of nowhere and he would just be flying around and I was like ... how... And then I would see him doing the LG+RJ on DM6 from LG door to GL...

Maybe the most definitive moment for me about jumping in qw was, again on DM3. I saw somebody do the rocket jump from quad to ring. Very simple, of course, you just need to know the right horizontal angle, but at the time it looked just impossible. That was back when I had that stupid "look all the way down and rocket jump" bind, that looked completely newfie and just propelled you straight into the air, and I couldn't even do that much manually at the time. So I clearly remember saying to someone I was on the server at the time something like "there's no way I will ever be able to do that..."

I spent lots of time on DM3 (and then on DM6) trying every jump, learned as many jumps as I could, as many rocket jumps, even ones that had no use in a game, just for their "wow, awesome" value... Some I couldn't ever master, but I'd do them 1 out of 10 and be happy good times

40 years and people still can't rocket jump and jump properly. "We" haven't came that far, only a few did. Some still play like its 1996 with a keyboard.

sane, how are you feeling today?